Trends in HMI & SCADA from Schneider Electric Software as well as the role of mobile devices, new megatrends such as IoT/IIoT in shaping the industrial world

Friday, July 31, 2015

What caused the increase in alarm notifications?

A guest blog post by Rob
Kambach Alarm
sub-systems serve a crucial function in the daily operation of a production or
management process. In a normal mode of operation, these systems provide
operators a snapshot of the current health of the equipment and overall process
performance. However, if alarms are not carefully monitored, a crucial event
could be missed with potentially damaging consequences. These damages might be
felt environmentally and economically, adversely affect equipment, and
potentially endanger lives.

An example of
an environmental management process concern is the unintended release of
hazardous material into the environment which harms the ecosystem or plant
surroundings. These unmitigated incidents can cause un-planned shutdowns,
production loss, and costly damages to equipment. Additionally, operations
outside normal or safe boundaries can create health and safety hazards, and
risk lives. In summary, the consequences of unaddressed alarm notifications can
be severe.

Often alarm
notifications are ignored by operators, because they occur too frequently. In
many cases a faulty design, rather than an unstable process, is the root cause
of untrustworthy and nuisance alarm notifications. The presence of large
amounts of noise in the system leads to a lack of operator trust in that
system, resulting in genuine abnormal situations being ignored or obscured by
that noise.

Over the next
several blog posts, we plan to examine
methods of effective alarm management, with the intent of informing the
reader of ways to improve operations through a well-planned system design and
execution of that design.

Ongoing
developments continue for automated control systems, and the evolution from
relay boards to Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), to smart devices has
dramatically increased the number of configured alarms and their representation
in a system. Consequently, typical control systems now have thousands of
configured alarms for each operator to manage.

During the
evolution of control systems technologies, the automation industry began
implementing concepts which expanded in scope to become what is now called the
“Internet of Things.” An aspect of this scenario is prevalent in the
manufacturing world; nearly every device added to a plant in the past decade is
“smart,” with smart drives, smart transmitters, and smart controllers in place.

From a
business perspective, going from “analog” to “smart” makes a lot of sense,
since for a relatively small investment things like smart drives can save up to
50 percent in energy cost. With that, additional data can be made available to
the Process Visualization: Current, Torque, Speed, Interlocks, Energy, Deviation,
Frequency, Supply Voltage, Trip Alarms, Communication Status, and Diagnostics.

But while this
“Smartness” is good, it leads to increased volume of data from devices.
Bringing more information to the attention of the operator is not inherently
bad, but a significant portion ofthis matter is considered “auxiliary
information” rather than actionable alarm
information.

Now it’s your
turn to share your experience with Alarms? How does your organization handle
it?

Special
thanks to Rob Kambach (Rob.Kambach@schneider-electric.com) for this article.

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